Wireless services are becoming increasingly popular and the demand for the limited supply of bandwidth for such services is increasing. New ways of supplying service to a larger population of users has resulted in the development of cellular technology which allows access to more users by limiting the range of transceiver base stations, and the mobile transceivers with which they communicate, to geographic cells. The smaller the individual cells (the shorter the range), the more users that can be supplied with service. Current cells with a 3 to 5 mile radius stand in contrast with much smaller ranges of microcells and picocells with transmission radii down to 100 feet or less.
With a need for to install smaller, and consequently more numerous, cells comes a need for adding and replacing base stations. This is expensive and labor intensive. Currently, to set up a base station transceiver, an RF engineer must determine the available channels and the available coverage area by performing channel measurements using a special transceiver with its own antenna. Manually setting up base stations ("drive tests") is time-consuming and expensive because it requires human labor and additional equipment. Also, determining the available channels from an antenna that is not identical nor located at the same position as the antenna of the base-station introduces inaccuracies in the channel determinations. Moreover, if conditions change, for example, due to replacement of an adjacent base station with one or more new base stations, the coverage area and channel allocation must be performed again.